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I had wanted to play Rhino Hero for a long, long time, and had built up really high expectations for it. Luckily, and unusually, it absolutely lived up to those expectations. This game is great.

Ostensibly, it is a kids’ game (ages 5+) so the premise is simple. Each player gets five cards, and the first player to get rid of all of their cards wins. You get rid of your cards by adding them to the ever-growing tower. You first lay down horizontally one or two folded cards to form ‘walls’, and then add a card from your hand as a ‘roof’ to the walls. This roof will have markings on it instructing the next player on how they must place the walls on their turn. And so the tower goes up, and up, and up.

Some cards instruct players to pick up an extra card, reverse the order of play, or most interesting of all, add the eponymous Rhino Hero to the tower. He takes the form of a solid wooden meeple. Exactly the kind you don’t want to have to balance precariously on a tower of cards that might be 10 layers high.

The first player to use up all of their cards wins, but more likely, and more often, the game ends when the tower collapses. In fact, in quite a lot of games, I have never actually seen anybody manage to place their fifth card. When the tower collapses, once you are done making fun of the person who collapsed it, you gather up the cards and play again. Because how could you not play again?

This week we join our friends and comic colleagues over at Semi Co-op in celebrating the wonderfully silly Flick ‘em Up! (this was accidental, not planned, but probably bound to happen eventually. Anyway, you should check their comic out, it’s great).

Flick ‘em Up! is technically a Wild West miniatures game. But it is also miniatures game where the movement and combat are resolved by flicking movement and bullet discs around the table top, trying to knock over your opponent’s meeples. Stetson-wearing meeples, obviously.

Despite the clearly ridiculous nature of it, it does also have some depth. There is definitely thinking required in terms of how you go about each of the 10 scenarios, in which order you activate you cowboys. I can see it having plenty of replay value past the initial novelty factor. And the box is packed with scenery too, so it looks amazing on the table. It’s definitely a game we will be playing quite a bit of in the coming weeks, and it’s most definitely not an attempt on my part to surreptitiously get Aileen more into miniatures games. Nope, for sure that’s not what I’m trying.

Quick, look over here, it’s a collection of quotes from our last game of Flick ‘em Up! that highlights the hilarities, hijinks and high noon antics of the game:

“This is much more fun that it has any right to be”

“Where did that disc go?”

“HAHAHAHA I can’t believe you missed from that distance”

“I swear this isn’t just a kid’s toy we bought, it’s an actual board game”

“It might be dangerous playing this with a dog around and so many tiny pieces flying off the table”

“Nail the varmint!”

“I think Pete just shot himself in the foot”

“Oh God does anyone have the number of a vet I think he’s choking”

Hilarious!

(No animals were actually harmed in the making of this comic or in the playing of Flick ‘em Up!)